Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Cab Thoughts

The turkey was fed and sheltered for 1000 consecutive days, but this did not mean that the butcher loved him. --anon
 
 
Nearly 85 percent of the population of Qatar is made up of foreigners.
 
A Kurdish official said that Jordan Matson, an American citizen, had joined the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), who are mainly battling advances by Islamic State close to Syria's borders with Turkey and Iraq. A friend of Matson's said he told online gaming friends about two months ago that he was joining a "private army" to fight Islamic State. Matson had said he was formerly in the military.
 
Who is.....Kim Philby?
 
Ignaz Semmelweiss (1818-1865) was a Hungarian physician who used a rigorous analytic approach to determine why women were dying from infection following childbirth. He concluded that there was a connection between the illness and hygiene--of the physician--and recommended vigorous hand-washing between patient contacts. (This was not ever done at the time.) He was committed to an insane asylum when he started to exhibit what was possibly the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. While there he was beaten by the staff and died from his injuries. One of the most important men of the 19th Century science world was beaten to death in a hospital by its staff.
 
An article, "How Climate Change Helped ISIS," was published in September in the Huffington Post.
 
An editorial writer for the Boston Globe with the wonderful name of Hiawatha Bray has written an article on the importance of addresses when evaluating epidemics. It is a clever idea being pursued by a number of people and countries particularly India, Ireland and the West African countries. Michael Olsen, a Utah land developer has a plan to put millions of people on the map, in Liberia and around the world. Olsen’s nonprofit organization, Addressing Homes LLC, has developed a universal standard for generating addresses, based on a building’s latitude and longitude. He uses Google. There is a funny moment where Olson goes to the Postmaster of Liberia, Frederick Norkeh, and shows him his plan and results.  “I want to take it home and show my wife and family we have an address,” Norkeh said.
 
 
Abigail Adams was determined to save her children from the fate of her brother and his family. (She had seen him succumb to alcohol and debauchery, desert his family, and leave them penniless.) She was very strict with her children. She actually took her seven year old son John Quincy to Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 to see the price paid for freedom. Amid the carnage he saw the Adams' family friend, Dr. Joseph Warren, killed.





The vineyard canary: Vintners plant roses among their vines because they get sick before anything else in the field. If there’s mildew in the air, it will infect the roses first and give a winemaker a heads-up that it’s time to spray.





Wainwright, a pitcher with consummate control, hit the Dodgers Puig with a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball. The next man up, Gonzalez, initiated an almost fight with this exchange with the Cardinal catcher Molina:

"I was just basically saying, 'You guys keep doing this over and over. We're not going to put up with that,'" Gonzalez said after the game. "They're going to say it's not on purpose, but come on. It's Wainwright. He knows where the ball is going." Gonzalez said Molina's response was, "You've got to respect me."
"I thought that was out of context, but it's what he said," the Dodgers first baseman said.
 
On Sept. 25, 2013, the Washington Post reported that Antarctic sea ice had grown to a record extent for the second straight year — some 19.51 million square kilometers. In June of this year, the Post noted a possible new record ice extent is "part of a puzzling 33-year trend in increasing sea ice around Antarctica."
 
"But even in the United States, human slavery now is greater than it ever was during the 18th or 19th century. In Atlanta, Georgia, we have between 200-300 girls sold into sexual slavery every month." So former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview. The fantasy world of politicians always substitutes hyperbole as fact. Like art, it becomes a reflection of reality and of value itself.
 
The National Book Foundation named the authors included on this year's "5 under 35" list. The young authors are occasional NPR contributor Alex Gilvarry, Yelena Akhtiorskaya, Valeria Luiselli, Kirstin Valdez Quade and Iraq War veteran Phil Klay, whose short story collection Redeployment also made it onto this year's longlist for the National Book Awards.
 
In 1940, the Japanese Army Air Force bombed Ningbo with ceramic bombs full of fleas carrying the bubonic plague. Many of these operations were ineffective due to inefficient delivery systems, although up to 400,000 people may have died. During the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign in 1942, around 1,700 Japanese troops died out of a total 10,000 Japanese soldiers who fell ill with disease when their own biological weapons attack rebounded on their own forces.
 
In the South China Sea there are four narrow  "choke points," the Malacca, Sunda, Lombok, and Makassar straits. More than half of the world's annual merchant fleet tonnage passes through these choke points, and a third of all maritime traffic worldwide. The oil transported through the Malacca Strait from the Indian Ocean, en route to East Asia through the South China Sea, is triple the amount that passes through the Suez Canal and fifteen times the amount that transits the Panama Canal. 200 small islands and rock/reefs lie in this area and, although most are rarely above water, these sites are lusted after by local nations--including China--because of their geographical importance but also for their possible oil reserves.



Factitious \fak-TISH-uhs\, adjective: 1. Produced artificially, in distinction from what is produced by nature. 2. Artificial; not authentic or genuine; sham. From Latin facticius, "made by art, artificial," from the past participle of facere, "to make."



The huge cyberattack on JPMorgan Chase that touched more than 83 million households and businesses was one of the most serious computer intrusions into an American corporation. Also troubling is that about nine other financial institutions — a number that has not been previously reported — were also infiltrated by the same group of overseas hackers, according to people briefed on the matter. The hackers are thought to be operating from Russia and appear to have at least loose connections with officials of the Russian government, the people briefed on the matter said. (NYT)





AAAAaaaannnnnnddddd......a poem that NPR called "devastating:"
 
Certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out
the tongue, and clog the lungs. Like thunder they drown
you in sound, no, like lightning they strike you across the
larynx. Cough. After it happened I was at a loss for words.
Haven’t you said this yourself? Haven’t you said this to a
close friend who early in your friendship, when distracted,
would call you by the name of her black housekeeper?
You assumed you two were the only black people in her
life. Eventually she stopped doing this, though she never
acknowledged her slippage. And you never called her on
it (why not?) and yet, you don’t forget. If this were a
domestic tragedy, and it might well be, this would be your
fatal flaw - your memory, vessel of your feelings. Do you
feel hurt because it’s the ‘all black people look the same’
moment, or because you are being confused with another
after being so close to this other?
 
An unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. The
wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth
and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing
your stomach in toward your rib cage. When you look
around only you remain. Your own disgust at what you
smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not
right away, because gathering energy has become its own
task, needing its own argument. You are reminded of a
conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of
sentences constructed implicitly with ‘yes, and’ rather
than ‘yes, but.’ You and your friend decided that ‘yes,
and’ attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative
routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the
blouse is rinsed, it’s another week, the blouse is beneath
your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good.
 
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and everywhere
else it is lost in the trees. You need your glasses
to single out what you know is there because doubt is
inexorable; you put on your glasses. The trees, their bark,
their leaves, even the dead ones, are more vibrant wet.
Yes, and it’s raining. Each moment is like this - before
it can be known, categorized as similar to another thing
and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen.
What did he just say? Did she really just say that? Did I
hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my
mouth, his mouth, your mouth? The moment stinks. Still
you want to stop looking at the trees. You want to walk out
and stand among them. And as light as the rain seems, it
still rains down on you.
--Claudia Rankine,  a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the 2014 winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize. She teaches at Pomona College.

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